New analysis estimates a five-year window for responding to AI impacts on higher education

Long-time tech watchers will likely remember Mary Meeker well. Ms Meeker is an American venture capitalist, focused on the technology sector, and the founder of the San Francisco-based investment firm BOND. She regularly appears on lists of the most influential business leaders globally and gained wider profile for her “Internet Trends” reports, which were an annual event for about 20 years. The last of those reports appeared in 2019, and they were famous for each providing hundreds of pages of charts and observations and were arguably some of the most widely read and cited analyses of their kind.

So it was a somewhat noteworthy development when Ms Meeker published a new report last month: “AI & Universities.”

The paper is essentially a call for higher education, corporations, and government to work together to, on the one hand, transform higher education to take full advantage of new AI technologies. On the other hand, it is also a call for continued American leadership in the field of generative AI.

“Actions taken in the next five years will be consequential,” says Ms Meeker. “It’s important for higher education to take a leadership role, in combination with industry and government. The ramp in artificial intelligence – which leverages the history of learning for learning – affects all forms of learning, teaching, understanding, and decision making…In the wake of ChatGPT and the AI explosion, we have likely reached a generational, fast and furious change across education. At their essence, AI and connected technology devices provide multimodal personalized output that can help users quickly get information and develop skills on their own terms. Tools that provide real-time feedback on engagement and skill development will continue to improve, enhancing the evolution of pattern recognition.”

She is echoing a point made by many others throughout history, from Aristotle to Khan Academy founder Sal Khan and many in between, which is that students benefit the most from individualized learning and from the chance to learn at their own pace. At the same time, Ms Meeker sees a number of factors coming together to drive change in higher education, including the rising costs of post-secondary, an increasing focus on ROI and career outcomes, and a greater emphasis on core skills and adaptability alongside more specific job or technical skills.

“To maintain academic relevance and market share, many universities require a mindset change,” she adds. “The key for universities today, we believe, will be creating education-as-a-service and generating ROI for student-customers while building best-in-class programs with differentiated teachers…Yesterday’s signaling credential may not make sense in a more meritocratic, skills-based world…[I]n each case, universities must determine their competitive advantages, create relevant best-in-class programs and environments, and find ways to gain share in an increasingly competitive environment.”

This is a paper to pay attention to, given the author and her audience, which will include many of the larger institutional and venture investors in the technology space. Investment continues to pour into AI technologies, and we should expect that this will only further accelerate growth in digital teaching and learning, including with respect to transnational education or other remote delivery.